Near Mumbai, Southeast Asian and British Colonial Touches Mark a Grand House

For a visitor new to the Mumbai coast, the cultural differences begin at the front door. Or, rather, the lack of one. "It's an open house," the wife says of the plantation-style weekend residence that she and her husband share on the Alibag peninsula, just outside the city. "It doesn't have a proper entrance."

Instead, you can enter the space she calls "the main transit room" through any of its dozen tall, glass-paned doors. Or you might step into another room altogether by way of the colonnaded corridor extending around much of the exterior, its floor, of Kotha stone, as reflective as water.

Although "it's a tropical house, South Indian style," according to its architect, Made Wijaya, who worked with project architect Bomi Irani, "its bones are British colonial." This is particularly true of the first floor, with its colonnade and stone arches. On the second floor, other influences come into play. What Wijaya calls its "timber elements"—balustrades and the like—are classically South Indian, while some of the windows and doors come from Southeast Asia.

The architect is himself a hybrid. Born in Australia, he moved to Bali at the age of 35, changing his name from Michael White and developing a reputation for his landscape designs. "I'm Truman Capote with a machete," he jokes, alluding to both his flamboyant personality and his way with tropical plantings.

The house is nestled in a betel palm grove and so close to the Arabian Sea that "when it's high tide, we have water at the gate," the wife says. Although it's large—some 15,000 square feet—the structure's colonnade and numerous terraces reduce its mass, making it seem skeletal, wide open to nature.

Life here, in favorable weather, moves seamlessly between inside and out; many spaces, including the main dining area, are outdoors. But India is a land of strong, sometimes unforgiving seasons, and the way in which almost every room is used can fluctuate with the time of year.

For the interior design, the owners turned to Sunil Jasani, of Fine Lines Designers in Mumbai; he and Wijaya joined forces in what the latter calls "a happy collaboration." Bright hues play a key part in the Indian vernacular: "When you go into the village, there's so much color all over," notes the wife. So it was only natural that, when the designers and clients decided they wanted to "give each room a different look," in Jasani's words, they did so by chromatic means.

The entrance hall is expansive, as reception rooms in Indian houses tend to be, and it has that particular gift, perhaps unique to the subcontinent, of using predominately muted tones—in this case, browns and beiges—in such a subtle way that the effect is somehow colorful. The adjacent study, by contrast, sizzles with bright, citrusy tones. Its walls are an acid green, and there's a raspberry-silk-upholstered divan festooned with orange-striped draperies—all atop a bright yellow inlaid floor. The Thai statue at the end of the room is one of "lots and lots of Buddhas" in the house, the wife says. "They give such a sense of calm and peace."

Such qualities apply to the interior spaces, too, notably the main sitting room—a loggia on the second floor with a soaring wood ceiling. This room was designed in part with acoustics in mind. To magnify the sound of waves crashing on the beach below, "we wanted to have it as high as possible," explains the wife. "We felt that the higher it was, the more of an echo there would be."

She came up with the idea of adding a pair of rectangular tile patterns—illusory carpets—to the floor. "There's so much wood in the house," she says. "I wanted this look to lift it." She found an ancient carpet pattern in a book on the royal textiles of India, then had it re-created in mosaic form by artist Chiru Chakravarty. Flamingly bright, in turquoise, white and orange, this tilework indeed elevates the space while organizing it into discrete seating areas.

As in a fanciful Indian legend, the house, with all of its attendant life, disappears on schedule once a year. "We kind of cover the place up," the wife says, describing how, in the months-long monsoon season, the rear, ocean-facing part of the house is draped in 13-foot-high jute panels to protect it from the fierce wind and rain. Seen from this perspective, wrapped, stark and monochromatic, it looks as if Christo and Jeanne-Claude happened by and were just beginning to transform this already artful residence into one of their signature works.

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